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NEWS: Crunchyroll to Stream Puella Magi Madoka Magica Anime

It's kind of funny that even though GATSU has long exhibited this behaviour, some people are still unaware of how much of a waste of time it is talking to him.

If you read his posts he's polite enough, but he just doesn't listen to anyone. Once he gets an idea in his head he refuses to accept that he could be wrong, even in the face of evidence that contradicts him.

He goes off on tangents like you wouldn't believe. He claims that Kuragehime (Princess Jellyfish) outsold Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The former show bombed which I think is sad, even though I never watched it.

GATSU's a fountain of biased and incorrect information, and stubbornly refuses to change his mind when wrong. That is not an insult towards him or a personal attack, it is a statement of fact. So please people, do not feed him.

If you want to waste your time pointlessly arguing, go argue with a brick wall.

GATSU's not a brick wall?!?

You haven't exactly told us how to add more data to a Blu-ray without ripping it and re-encoding it, either. I am curious to see what you can point to that shows how easy it is to add all those additional elements to a commercial Blu-ray.

How is getting a disc player to ignore the bits of data which say play/don't play anywhere near equivalent to changing the data on a commmercial disc?

If you look at this post, you'll see that Madoka did quite well with the average number of discs sold per volume last year, and it gives you an idea how the BD vs. DVD sales went...

Which stats? I just see a list of articles that refer to Madoka Magica.

How is that not what AniplexUSA has done? Press new discs with four dual-audio, subtitled episodes, create english-language packaging and put them together.

I can see how you could perhaps say that if the US release of the import set came long after the sales in Japan slowed down and they had extra copies laying around all over the place, but when we got it no more than a week after the Japanese release?

Sony will want each part of the company to show a profit, and Sony's disc-pressing subsidiary can't do that if they give their services away. It makes perfect sense...

Ingraman:

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You haven't exactly told us how to add more data to a Blu-ray without ripping it and re-encoding it, either. I am curious to see what you can point to that shows how easy it is to add all those additional elements to a commercial Blu-ray.

Well, this is a start.

And it, of course, makes no financial sense, since the pressing of new BDs is only a fraction of the cost of the generation of the materials that were supposed to be "hacked" onto already existing BD discs, and the hacking process would be an ad hoc and,

agila:

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And it, of course, makes no financial sense, since the pressing of new BDs is only a fraction of the cost of the generation of the materials that were supposed to be "hacked" onto already existing BD discs, and the hacking process would be an ad hoc and,

Again, packaging adds to the cost.

Ingraman:

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You haven't exactly told us how to add more data to a Blu-ray without ripping it and re-encoding it, either. I am curious to see what you can point to that shows how easy it is to add all those additional elements to a commercial Blu-ray.

Well, this is a start.

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How is getting a disc player to ignore the bits of data which say play/don't play anywhere near equivalent to changing the data on a commmercial disc?

I think you answered your own question.

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If you look at this post, you'll see that Madoka did quite well with the average number of discs sold per volume last year, and it gives you an idea how the BD vs. DVD sales went...

Actually, that's a bit misleading, because it calculates BD and DVD sales.

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Which stats? I just see a list of articles that refer to Madoka Magica.

Articles on sales ranks.

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How is that not what AniplexUSA has done? Press new discs with four dual-audio, subtitled episodes, create english-language packaging and put them together.

If they pressed new discs, then why not make enough LEs to sustain demand longer?

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I can see how you could perhaps say that if the US release of the import set came long after the sales in Japan slowed down and they had extra copies laying around all over the place, but when we got it no more than a week after the Japanese release?

It's an expensive property, and they knew it'd be niche, even in Japan.

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Sony will want each part of the company to show a profit, and Sony's disc-pressing subsidiary can't do that if they give their services away. It makes perfect sense...

I'm not sure how it makes sense for them to be profitable by paying extra for something they already own.

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If you look at this post, you'll see that Madoka did quite well with the average number of discs sold per volume last year, and it gives you an idea how the BD vs. DVD sales went...

Actually, that's a bit misleading, because it calculates BD and DVD sales.

TheAncientOne:

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One cannot take a commercial DVD and add information to it. They are stamped from a master, in a process not entirely dissimilar to how vinyl records are made.

Except you can't recode vinyl.

TheAncientOne:

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Yet you seem to be suggesting they added subtitles, changed the region code, added a dub soundtrack and somehow replaced the original menus with English menus.

Well, if you can hack a DVD/BD player to make it region-free, I'm not sure why you can't do the same for the disc itself.

I've already stated that discs can be ripped and re-encoded, but that's not changing the manufactured disc, that's making a changed duplicate (and that's a silly term, isn't it?).

The Madoka line says an average per-volume release of 71,057 discs, which is immediately broken down to 10,234 DVDs + 60,823 BDs on the same line.

Since you mentioned them before as having outsold Madoka: Tiger&Bunny averaged 27,948 discs (2,014 DVD + 25,935 BD); Kuragehime/Princess Jellyfish averaged 1,072 discs (586 DVD + 487 BD).

Movies often outsell even top-selling series, especially since there's no committing to them as you would a series, so I can see both Naruto and One Piece movies perhaps selling more, but no one seems to buy the TV episode discs.

They "knew it'd be niche"? If the earlier DVDs sold as well as the one for the final movie (22k+ according the post linked to below), then sales were pretty good.

They don't seem to have overproduced the Kara no Kyoukai sets since neither HMV, CDJapan, nor Amazon have copies left to sell.

Heck, if the KnK BD box sold about 27k copies (as shown at the bottom of this post, that's about as many copies as Tiger&Bunny averaged per volume. How is that a flop?

Someone needs to pay for the use/maintenance of the equipment, the materials involved, and the wages of the employees. It's not likely that all the income from each division of Sony immediately goes back into one big bank account. Subsidiaries have to meet income expectations, or they're sold off or shut down.

Actually, as vinyl could be reformed into a flat disc under heat and pressure, they could be reformed into a smooth disc and restamped, but it would make little economic sense to do so.

Even if it were possible to do so, it makes no economic sense. The actual cost per disc is small.

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The Madoka line says an average per-volume release of 71,057 discs, which is immediately broken down to 10,234 DVDs + 60,823 BDs on the same line.

It's misleading, because it was implied that it was an average per disc, rather than the series as a whole.

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Since you mentioned them before as having outsold Madoka: Tiger&Bunny averaged 27,948 discs (2,014 DVD + 25,935 BD); Kuragehime/Princess Jellyfish averaged 1,072 discs (586 DVD + 487 BD).

Perhaps, but those shows still had higher weekly sales ranks than Madoka

[Tiger & Bunny and Kuragehime] didn't have gimmicky LEs to artificially inflate company earnings like Madoka. Nor does it prove that the show is more popular in the sense that it would have done well, if sold as a bare-bones item.

Ingraman:

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I've already stated that discs can be ripped and re-encoded, but that's not changing the manufactured disc, that's making a changed duplicate (and that's a silly term, isn't it?).

So you're saying a company which set the standards for replicating the discs can't reverse engineer them?

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They don't seem to have overproduced the Kara no Kyoukai sets since neither HMV, CDJapan, nor Amazon have copies left to sell.

But they're still streaming it, which probably means they lost money on the cost of producing it.

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Someone needs to pay for the use/maintenance of the equipment, the materials involved, and the wages of the employees. It's not likely that all the income from each division of Sony immediately goes back into one big bank account. Subsidiaries have to meet income expectations, or they're sold off or shut down.

You're gonna pay for maintenance, materials, and wages, anyway. Not sure why you wanna pay double for the first two, though.

AncientOne:

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Actually, as vinyl could be reformed into a flat disc under heat and pressure, they could be reformed into a smooth disc and restamped, but it would make little economic sense to do so.

I see. The more you know...

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Even if it were possible to do so, it makes no economic sense. The actual cost per disc is small.

Again, it's the packaging and shipping which adds to the cost.

And averaging multiple weeks of a single volume is pointless and does not give you anything remotely useful.

They only had higher weekly ranks if their first week of release was after the first week of a Madoka release

Tiger and Bunny's first week sales beating Madoka's second or third week sales does not mean Tiger and Bunny sold more than Madoka Magica.

If Kuragehime happened to have better sales on its first week when a volume of Madoka Magica was on its fourth or fifth week, that does not in any way suggest it did better than Madoka Magica.

The sales numbers prove that Madoka Magica is the third best selling show of the past decade,

while Tiger and Bunny was a very good seller but not remotely close to Madoka Magica and Kuragehime was a total sales bomb.

Both Tiger & Bunny and Kuragehime had LE versions. Almost every release in Japan has an LE version and that's pretty much the only one that people buy.

Madoka's release was pretty standard, there wasn't anything unusual about the extras in them. They only came with a booklet and a CD. Pretty much every single anime release comes with a booklet of some sort, though some are nicer than others. Madoka Magica's are average.

If any of those three shows were going to be "inflated" by "gimmicky" extras, it would be Kuragehime. The first volume came with a talking Kurara mascot, an "unaired" episode (which I assume is just an animated omake video but that's still more than Madoka Magica had), and what looks like a video extra with two of the seiyuu (again, Madoka Magica didn't have that). Yet it sold 1k to Madoka Magica's ~70k.

There's no point in 'reverse engineering' discs when you have the masters.

Not to mention the fact that the data layer is protected by the hard coating, so you're looking at undoing that at a minimum.

Non sequitor. There's no reason to stop streaming unless it's losing you money or you've lost the license.

Sony isn't "paying double" by having one subsidiary charging another for a product; it's merely debiting one of its accounts and crediting another(to vastly over simplify things).

Think about this for a moment: to make 10,000 LE packages with new discs is a mostly automated process with the vast majority of the labor involved only in setting everything up.

Even assuming that the marginal costs of repressing a disc is substantially less than the marginal cost of pressing fresh ones(which is just a few cents at most),

Ingraman:

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I've already stated that discs can be ripped and re-encoded, but that's not changing the manufactured disc, that's making a changed duplicate (and that's a silly term, isn't it?).

So you're saying a company which set the standards for replicating the discs can't reverse engineer them?

AncientOne:

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Even if it were possible to do so, it makes no economic sense. The actual cost per disc is small.

Again, it's the packaging and shipping which adds to the cost.